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up vote 42 down vote favorite
5

I want to search for what += means, but Google won't return any documents.

Also when I come across some PHP code I don't understand I can't search for the keywords as written.

How can I search for these special characters or include these special characters in a search.

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Lol, you get 10 results if you include it in quotes, none of them containing the string ;-). – Gamecat Jul 31 '09 at 14:02
1  
I get the error "$# is no longer supported" on Perl 5.10 – Brad Gilbert Jul 31 '09 at 14:05
3  
Somebody claim those bonus points. I've worked with perl but I've never reached the level where this code snippet would be comprehensible to me. You can tell, because I'm still sane. – quillbreaker Jul 31 '09 at 14:07
13  
I think you forgot to post the code and just mashed your keyboard. – Salgar Jul 31 '09 at 14:16
I am claiming the bonus points. See below. – Sinan Ünür Jul 31 '09 at 15:11
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9 Answers

up vote 16 down vote accepted

Unfortunately, this is not possible.

From the official Google Help Page:

Generally, punctuation is ignored, including @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and other special characters

I would try looking at other search engines or resources that might be helpful. Something like GitHub might be useful.

Sources from Google Help Forum:

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Note that Google Code Search is no longer available as of today, alas. groups.google.com/group/google-code-search/browse_thread/thread/… – Alex Dupuy Jan 15 '12 at 7:50
up vote 19 down vote

Write it out:

-f: perldoc -f -X. If no file name is specified (as is the case here) checks if $_ contains the name of a plain file

>: Checks if the RHS is greater than the LHS

@+: In scalar context, returns the number of elements in @+

?: the conditional operator

*<: The glob for main::<

.: String concatenation operator

-&'_: Invokes a subroutine main::_. FYI, ' is the perl4 style package name separator. Try perl -MHTML'Template -e 1.

: : Continuing with conditional operator

$# : The output format for printed numbers

/ : Division operator

%! : %ERRNO; see perldoc perlvar

So, it is not impossible to understand if you put a little effort into it. Clearly, this is not how anyone should write programs, but there some benefit from people pushing the boundaries.

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Wow, bravo. I missed $# (deprecated?) and -&'_. – Mark Canlas Jul 31 '09 at 15:13
@Mark thanks. $# no longer exists. I do not know when it was phased out. Searching Google for google.com/search?q=perl4+%24%23 led me to it. – Sinan Ünür Jul 31 '09 at 15:19
up vote 9 down vote

I noticed that some words with punctuation are indexed.

For example:

  • C++
  • i++
  • Micro$oft

Here's Google's official documentation of this feature:

Punctuation that is not ignored

  • Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.
  • The dollar sign ($) is used to indicate prices. [ nikon 400 ] and [ nikon $400 ] will give different results.
  • The hyphen - is sometimes used as a signal that the two words around it are very strongly connected. (Unless there is no space after the - and a space before it, in which case it is a negative sign.)
  • The underscore symbol _ is not ignored when it connects two words, e.g. [ quick_sort ].
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up vote 8 down vote

Sorry, you can't. The inability to search for line noise on Google is the bane of programmers. Try looking for articles about A* search sometime.

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This seems to get plenty of results: google.com/search?q="a+star"+search+algorithm – Jon Skeet Jul 31 '09 at 14:07
3  
Makes me miss AltaVista – Eli Jul 31 '09 at 14:08
The trick is word and character distance and association. A search for "a* search"brings up the Wikipedia page as the first relevant result. It may treat the "*" as a space, but it works due to the association with "search". – Killroy Jul 31 '09 at 14:09
Interestingly searching for "A*" on Bing yields the Wikipedia page as the first result, Google gives me a bunch of noise. Maybe locally relevant noise for "A" but not what I wanted :) – Joey Aug 3 '09 at 19:41
Google does have some special cases for some punctuation. A search for C# turns up expected results. Shame A* doesn't. – Nelson Aug 31 '09 at 20:12
up vote 5 down vote

Well, you can bing it by putting quotes around it, but it doesn't seem to come up with anything relevant:
http://www.bing.com/search?q="-f>@%2B%3F*<.-%26'_:$%23/%25!"

A google search also came up with irrelevant results until I added "perl" to the query, in which case it actually came up with a stackoverflow question about your favorite programmer joke which had that string:
http://www.google.com/search?q="-f>@%2B%3F*<.-%26'_:$%23/%25!"+perl

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up vote 3 down vote

Google doesn't search for punctuation characters as far as I know. In this case what you might want to try is to search with a description of your characters: something like "plus equals" or plusequals. That will probably find you something, especially if you add the programming language to your query (PHP in this case).

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This is a good approach, but you will probably also get many unrelated answers. For this particular case, you're lucky, because if you search for plusequal in Google, the first hit is to this article: += plus equal sign - C / C++ answers, which is probably a good answer to what you want. – awe Apr 19 '11 at 7:22
up vote 3 down vote

You can use http://www.symbolhound.com [disclosure: I am a developer for the site]

Unlike Google (even codesearch) SymbolHound includes special characters and symbols in a web search. ex: @#$%^&*()=+[]\ etc.

You should be able to find results for += http://symbolhound.com/?q=%2B%3D The index is constantly growing, so each day the results will be more and more relevant.

I hope this answers your question! Best of luck

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up vote 2 down vote

Ask a question about it on superuser.com and wait for Google to index it. I just found this page by googling "-f>@+?*<.-&'_:$#/%!" (with the quotes).

The resulting search page URL is http://www.google.ca/search?q="-f>@%2B%3F*<.-%26'_:$%23/%25!"

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up vote 0 down vote

I thought if you placed something in quotes it would force a search of that exact term.

ie searching for

"C++"

would search for C++ and not just C

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1  
This is because the phrase C++ is indexed specially. You actually don't need the quotes. See the answer from Senseful. So the C++ gets valid hits for C++ (not C and C#) because it is indexed, but "1+2" ignores the + and returns all that contain 1 and 2 because 1+2 is not indexed. – awe Apr 19 '11 at 7:31

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